An Urban's Rural View

If you've stayed at a hotel lately, you've probably been offered the opportunity to help save the environment by reusing your towels. "Can you imagine," the little towel-rack hanger asks, "the number of towels that have been used only once that have to be washed every day in all the hotels in the world?"

Is this an example of hotels going green, as the Green Hotels Association (http://tiny.cc/…), says? Or is it, as critics charge (http://tiny.cc/…), a classic case of "greenwashing?" The real aim, the critics say, is to save money on labor and utilities; the hotels are just wrapping their self-interest in an environmental flag. Greenwashing.

As it happens, re-using hotel towels actually does seem to be good for the environment (http://tiny.cc/…), whatever the hotels' motivation. But the term greenwashing has caught on and spread.

These days, businesses of all kinds, not just hotels, know that if they make a claim to environmental friendliness they can't support, they risk at the very least an embarrassing public scolding. In Australia, they can even be fined (http://tiny.cc/…).

Serious companies, then, including of course food processors and retailers, set standards for how their products are made and hire independent certification companies to verify the standards are being met. It's in these standards and their verification that the opportunities and challenges for agriculture lie.

The opportunities and challenges are flip sides of a coin: higher product prices on one side, higher production costs on the other. If customers want organic, or non-GMO, or antibiotic-free, or whatever their green flavor of the day might be, presumably they'll pay more for those attributes.

But will they pay enough? In addition to higher production costs, the farmer may have to pay the certification company's bill. You can imagine the supermarket-chain buyer's reaction when the big hog raiser tells him, "Sure, I can give you larger farrowing crates so you can boast about that on the label. But I need 30% more to do it profitably."

You can also imagine the premiums shrinking over the years as more and more producers sniff the profit to be made by marching in the green parade.

Another challenge: As food companies seek to out-green competitors, they're tempted to set their own standards for how products are grown rather than strive for an industry standard. Organic farmers, at least, have a single, government-set standard to meet. But what if five different bread companies have five different definitions of environmentally friendly wheat growing?

The irony is that there's only so much businesses can do to shield themselves from greenwashing disparagement anyway. Standards and certification may protect a specific practice against the greenwashing charge, but it won't deflect what I think of as "half-a-loaf greenwashing" indictments: "OK, this one thing you're doing may be verifiably green, but so much of what you do is bad for the environment that it's hypocritical of you to tout this one."

Nor can companies easily deflect greenwashing attacks like those aimed at the hotels, where the practice is good for the bottom line as well as the environment. It's smarmy, in the critics' view, for the hotels to pat themselves and their customers on the back for their civic virtue when the real objective is filthy lucre.

Still, when there's money to be made selling greener-than-thou products, you can't blame the food folks for trying. Let's just hope they do it in a way that lets farmers and ranchers share in the bounty, and not at their expense.

Urban Lehner

urbanity@hotmail.com

(CZ)

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